Inquiring Minds Want to Know

I get the question at least once a week, “So, what’s he doing now? How’s he filling his time?”

I feel as if I should be answering in broad technicolor strokes — “Well, he went white water rafting yesterday and tomorrow he and a buddy are heading out to Key West to go fishing.”

But he neither rafts nor fishes. He’s never expressed the desire to learn how to [blank]. And despite knowing retirement was in the offing, he made no preparations, set no goals, had no plans to fill the formless void of the coming days. Instead of technicolor answers I respond in 8 millimeter black and white. “He goes to the gym. He spends a lot of time at the library. He’s taking a religion class once a week.” That last is something he has dearly wanted to do. I am glad he finally can.

It’s his life after all; the time is his to do as he pleases. And it’s only been three months.
After thirty-plus years he’s surely entitled to take life as slow as he wants. He says he’s happy. I’ve heard him tell people more than once, “I don’t know where the time goes but before I know it the day is gone.”

But he is young. A newly-minted sixty-something. How will I answer the curious next year? And the year after that? He doesn’t seem to be the least concerned. So why am I?

A New Year Up in the Air

What better way to ring out the old and ring in the new than to go see Up in the Air with a theaterful of other Michiganders? The protagonist’s job was bleak — and close, possibly too close, to the bone — he flies around the country laying people off. But the actor playing the protagonist was George Clooney. Need I say another word?  It was sad, it was thought-provoking, it was funny. And why was Detroit’s the only airport slushed in with snow and perpetually grey?

Detroit, and by extension Michigan, has come in for bashing for decades. Much of it deserved, much of it the gleeful schadenfreude of an ignorant populace. I got more than peeved listening to Michael Feldman on “What Do You Know?” the other day. “Detroit hasn’t produced anything the country has wanted for years,” he mocked in this supercilious tone. I wanted to put in a personal call to Clooney to pay Feldman a visit. The things Feldman doesn’t know about Detroit would fill a parking garage. I bet he doesn’t drive American, either.

Last night there was solidarity in the audience. Employed or not, retired or not, laid off or not, we’ve all been touched. We’re all scared, we’re all uncertain. And we’re all tough. The movie’s final frames featured cameo interviews with those laid off reflecting on what was getting them through. They articulated the same blessings that get us through any year, difficult or joyous: the love of family and friends, the devotion of children, the gumption to get up and face a new day.

When the final credits began to roll applause broke out. For the movie, surely. And also for ourselves. Every minute of every day, life itself is up in the air. Down here on the ground, all we can do is put one foot in front of the other. And so we do.

Home Together

You’d think we never do anything or go anywhere given the heading of most of these posts: Home Alone 1, and 2, Honey I’m Home and now this one. We do get out. We do have travel plans. But I suppose the focus on home is because that’s the locus where the relationship has changed most,the operative suffix being “us”.

But this morning after breakfast we were both puttering around in our respective rooms: bookkeeping, reading, checking in with one another every once in a while.  Today, I could get used to this parallel play. Today it feels nice to have company at a comfortable remove. Not yesterday, when the blare of the TV drove me to distraction until he lowered it a bar or two. And not the day before yesterday when I was up here writing and he came in to show me something “important” completely breaking my train of thought and driving away words that didn’t return. Like those hazy threads of dreams that evaporate with consciousness, they are gone. He hasn’t quite grasped the concept of leaving me be when the door is shut and I am writing. However, that was the day before yesterday. There’s always tomorrow to learn new lessons.

And today, today it’s working. Home. Together.

Honey, I’m Home

The tables are turned; the roles are reversed.  Driving home from work today (after having picked up some Chinese for dinner because who wants to start cooking after a full day at work and the Mr. hasn’t yet gotten the hang of having dinner waiting), I realized that one of the things I miss on planet retired spouse is his call at 6:15.  Or 6:00.  ”I’ll be home at 6:30.”   And for 25 years, he was.  Sometimes it was 6:50 and sometimes 6:28 but year in and year out, I had dinner waiting and greeting him as he came through the door.  Of course there were nights when I was out schelpping the kids and thank heavens in those days for Dominos. But the pattern was always there.  He came home and I greeted him. Sounds REAL retro, I know. Very Betty Crocker and not Betty Friedan.

But it’s the truth: my husband has retired and I miss the  quiet anticipation of his return each evening from work.  Dinner would be nearly ready, the table would be set.  The house was quiet. Sometimes I’d be working upstairs or sometimes I’d be down in the kitchen  sauteeing onions so he’d think dinner was further along than it actually was.  I miss greeting him, welcoming him back home. I’ve always taken pride in creating a home, a haven for my family and that gesture of the 6:30 welcome is now gone from our lives. These days he is there to greet me but it just doesn’t feel the same.

Home Alone

Thought I would be writing many more posts, loyal as Julie on her Julia kick in the eponymous movie. But I’ve barely managed a bi-monthly entry. First time however, I’ve ever actually used the word eponymous in a piece of writing, or two eponymous movies in one post.

He is gone for a week.  The house is silent, wrapping me in comfort me, soft as the down quilt I’m burrowed beneath as I write. There is no TV blaring; no other energy humming but mine. After 25 years at home and the past five completely to myself during the week, having him home 24/7 has been a strain. Correction, he’s home now 24/7;  I’m only home 24/4 thanks to a job I began back in February. The strain is not having my accustomed solitude.

Last night a girlfriend came over to dinner.  I put together a meal quick quick — soup salad baked apples.  I set the table pretty, perked up the flowers bought last Saturday. I put on a Billy Joel CD and as the soup simmered I rock and rolled around the house a la Meredith and Christina. Dog in dirt, pig in clover. Whatever your metaphor, I reveled like a teenager having the whole house to herself.

I feel like I am getting to know my house again, a friend from whom I had temporarily parted. I  hear the ticking of the various clocks, the shifts and groans of the modern wonders of comfort — furnace, water heater — the small creaks of the floorboards as I walk room to room.

The joy is temporary, as he returns in six days. And I do realize that my solitude is joyful precisely because it is indeed temporary.

ESP

There is a certain wonderful shorthand long-marrieds acquire.  It’s not about finishing one another’s sentences in haste but coming to the rescue of those evanescent fragments.

Me: “You know who we never heard from?”

Him: “Who?”

Me: “Uh. Uhm.. you know, the…. urologist.”

Him: “Yeah, I thought of them this week. You’re right.”

In that brief exchange what was really being recalled was the fact that we invited to our Sukkah party a neighborhood couple. We never heard from them and they didn’t show up. Disappointing, as we’ve wanted to get to know them better, and they knew many of the others who had been invited.

The paths of our conversations are so well worn that we can go down them barefoot, blindfolded even and still know our way. Admittedly this has a dangerous side, too. Knowing one another’s stories so well can get tiresome. I once said that we could probably have an argument without saying a word but just reading each other’s faces. He laughed, recognizing the truth in it.

But it’s not a bad trade-off — listening to his stories for what sometimes feels like one time too many, in exchange for the comfort of being so close that our very minds are sometimes one.

Home Alone

For the first time in what seems like eons I am home alone.  The way I used to be for over two decades. The kids would leave for school.  He would leave for work and peace would settle over the house. Quiet in every corner. The faint sound of a clock ticking in one room.  Or the distant drone of lawn mowers or snowblowers filtering through walls and windows. But no radios. No TV’s. No music. Just me and my computer working on the day’s article, cottoned in the simple stillness and quiet that so many mothers crave and devour like warm sweet custard.

I do not have to be at work until noon. He is out getting a flu shot. I begged off for good reason and had a morning’s worth of errands to run before heading to work. But it is quiet here. All the more quiet and all the more charged for its absence. This unexpected respite of silence wraps its arms around me. I quit my fingers on the keyboard. Close the laptop and simply sit and drink in the silence.

Who’s Been Writing in My Calendar?

He is writing in my date book. My weekly planner. The one that sits on the third shelf above the counter that, for seventeen years has been referred to as Mom’s Counter. The one I choose each year, savoring the photographs, trying to remember the Yogi Paramabansa Yogananda’s meditations as I get swept up in the week’s comings and goings.

Yes. I should be glad that he has activities to write in it. Glad that he is making plans. Glad that his week is filling up with things to do and people to do them with. But for nearly thirty years I’ve been the only one writing in that book. His bold and scraggly handwriting takes up nearly half the day’s allotted space. For one luncheon date.

There are many things I can do. Keep quiet and welcome the fact that he is taking small steps at re-invention. Get him his own book to write in. Go electronic and get myself a Palm. Chill out and get a life.

He’s a wonderful photographer and I’ve dreamed of seeing his photos in the pages of this engagement calendar. Maybe now he’ll get inspired. See the possibilities in the pages. Perhaps the calendar  will engage in a new way. By choosing just the right image to send. Or maybe by talking about one of the Yogi’s teachings.

Like this one, “Let go and relax…When you are calm, you feel the whole whole universe of happiness rocking gently beneath your consciousness.”

I Need a Wife

“Do not EVER refer to me like that!” my husband said with a vehemence that startled me.  I’d asked him what he thought about the  Modern Love column in the NY Times. The author, writing about her and her partner’s decision to refer to one another as wife, recalled a 1970′s essay in MS Magazine titled “I Need a Wife.” The author of the MS article bemoaned the fact that since she began working outside the house there was no one to do the cooking and cleaning, the marketing, the picking up of the drycleaning; the remembering to get a quart of milk and the last minute run for poster board for little Susie’s fourth grade project. Had he heard me say that I needed a wife? Or had he heard me think it?

For you see, I began “working outside the house” last February. A job literally fell from the sky and I took it.  After freelancing for twenty-five years — OK let’s call a spade a spade — after being a stay-at-home mom with a freelance writing career that never brought home too much bacon — I was offered a terrific part time job. As a writer. At pay that is making a real difference. Just as the mister is leaving the work world. And I have thought more than once how nice it would be to have a wife who would have a meal ready when I come home; who would to see that we are low on milk and make it appear in the fridge; who would  know that  I’m running low on undies and make a new stack appear before I’m down the last pair.

I don’t know whether his vehemence was fueled by the looming loss of his place in the work world, or his repugnance (how dear) at the concept of ‘wife’ reduced to a series of chores. He was right in an endearing kind of way.  As his wife I am certainly more than chief cook and bottle washer, every bit as much as  he is more than wage earner and lawn mower. We are not what we do.

So who’s going to make that first dinner when I come home from work and he is there at the door to greet me? How delicious it would be to come home to a set table, to the scent of onions sauteeing and a salad in progress! Maybe we’ll prepare our meal together. And who will do the marketing?

September 10, 2009

Times I have traveled solo — dozens

Times he has traveled solo — once

Last week over the Labor Day holiday I went south to see my mom and he went north to visit with friends at their lake house. It just worked out that way. While I’ve been on girlfriend getaways and have taken up to a month away to work on books in progress, he had never taken a trip alone to be with friends. Business trips, yes; visits to his family, yes. But never a pleasure trip without his erstwhile companion. Moi. Not that I never offered or encouraged…

It was a sweet homecoming. There was something different about both of us come home from our separate adventures. This time around he had stories to tell, too. Of the beauty of the lake, of playing with our friends’ new grandchild, of hanging out and just being by himself. His face was animated in a way I haven’t seen in months. The past year has taken its toll. Bankruptcy of his company, the loss of dreams, of his place in the business world. Time and attrition left him the third oldest in his department. The stories went from bleak to bleaker.

The weekend gave him new stories to tell. He went first; our walk and talk lasted longer than usual and he had more to tell than I did. More than hearing about what he did, I loved watching his face, hearing the delight in his voice as he related what he did, what he saw, the restaurants they visited.

The roles are switching. He has another trip planned. I was to have gone with him but now I am working. So I’ll be the one kissing him goodbye at the airport and then heading off to work. I’ll be the one waiting in the cellphone lot awaiting his plane. Already I await the new stories to come, the enthusiasm in his voice.